Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain

[Bombphoon]

New archival research on the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in this whopping 464-page book:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/18045499...v_ov_lig_pi_dp

[Chris Goss]

Crikey how many more books are coming out on this subject? I am interested to know what new revelations this and the plethora of others will reveal

[Jukka Juutinen]

She has pretty solid academic credentials and seems to be involved in aircraft history off-duty as well. Which is much more than can be said for many other authors. I think even Axis Wings has her work.

[robert]

And cover shows a Bf109 that has been not involved in BoB

[Jukka Juutinen]

Originally Posted by robert

And cover shows a Bf109 that has been not involved in BoB

Authors don't choose cover designs. There was once an Amazon review of a book on history of air war from a doctrinal point of view by a top-class military analyst Martin van Creveld. That reviewer dismissed the book because the cover photo was a mirror image...

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by robert

And cover shows a Bf109 that has been not involved in BoB

You should see British TV when it reports on the Battle of Britain: to illustrate Summer 1940 they use a package of Imperial War Museum footage that includes an Fw 190 being shot down over a snow-covered landscape.

Dr. Taylor's website is here, by the way: https://spitfirefillyaviation.com

[Edward]

After reading the publisher's synopsis of the book with its description of primary source German documents and eyewitness accounts, I am certainly interested in Dr. Taylor's Eagle Days.

However the first paragraph is pretty awkward and reads like a first draft by an intern.

“By the summer of 1940, Great Britain watched as France succumbed to the might of Adolf Hitler’s forces. Her forces driven off the continent, many rescued from capture at Dunkirk, only the Royal Air Force, supported by the country’s newly established radar system, now stood in the way of the country being invaded. . . . "

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by Edward

After reading the publisher's synopsis of the book with its description of primary source German documents … I am certainly interested in Dr. Taylor's Eagle Days.

It helps that there are lots of those free online now: Luftflotte 3 mission reports; Luftwaffe western theatre daily ops reports; Lw. 10-daily unit strengths and operational readiness stats; Quartermaster General loss reports … plenty of rabbit holes for the researcher to disappear down. I'd imagine that the team working on the revised Battle of Britain Then and Now will be scouring those as well.

[Chris Goss]

I always have an input to my book covers albeit I don't always agree with the end result. As to academic qualifications, I am one of the rare ones having a Masters with Merit in War Studies from Kings College London. When I added to my thesis to produce Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain, was told I should have put this forward for a PhD!

[Nick Beale]

I added to my thesis to produce Luftwaffe Fighter Bombers over Britain

And it's greatly to your credit that it reads like a proper book. I've read a few theses about Second World War aviation (they're often online at the university concerned) and books based on them. The prevailing academic conventions seem to result in something a long way from anything that an 'outsider' would enjoy reading or even learn much from. Much of the object seems to be demonstrating how thoroughly familiar you are with the work already done by others in the field. For example, you can download Dr. Taylor's 'Après moi, le déluge : redressing the wartime and postwar mythologization of Operation CHASTISE in Britain' here: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4221081

To me, it just seemed that far more words were devoted to what other writers said (or didn’t) about the raid rather than presenting anything new that she might have unearthed from her own research.